Come for gumbo and jambalaya; stay for the phenomenal hero with a powerful growth story.
Jillian Robichaux is determined to fight back when her beloved home’s threatened by coastal erosion.
Tiny Boutin, Louisiana—with houses built on tall stilts—has survived devastating hurricanes, but it’s unusually heavy rain that causes a massive flood and blows her estranged father back into her life. After rescuing an elderly woman’s old photographs from her flooding house, 13-year-old Jillian doesn’t recognize some places in the pictures, despite her hometown’s being a keystone of her identity. Investigating further, she learns how much of her town has ended up underwater over the past half-century. Worse, the state doesn’t want to repair the damaged bridges or schools (instead shuttling kids to a larger town’s schools), devastating Boutin’s chances for recovery. Stubborn Jillian teams up with her brainy cousin and an artistic activist friend from her new school for a three-pronged approach to the disaster: a video and photographic oral history project to preserve locals’ memories, a petition to save the school, and service helping ecological groups plant marsh grass to combat coastal erosion. The projects’ trajectories manage to balance optimism, empowerment, and realistic ideas of what success looks like—the last causing emotional struggles for Jillian. Most characters are Cajun; there are two prominent Black characters, and southern Louisiana’s Vietnamese community is acknowledged. Fictional Boutin’s dilemmas are inspired by real climate change events.
Come for gumbo and jambalaya; stay for the phenomenal hero with a powerful growth story. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-82426-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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